The Icarus Show Read online

  It’s always embarrassing when adults cry, and especially when you know them. I wanted to change the subject at once, deviate from it as soon as I could, but also I was curious.

  “Is it your illness?” I said.

  It wasn’t.

  “How many times do I have to tell you?” she burst out. “I—am—not—ill!”

  “What, then?” I said. “Why were you—crying?”

  “Well, why do people usually cry?”

  I shrugged. “Because they’re sad?”

  She gave me a look with eyebrows raised, her nearest thing to a nod.

  “But why?” I said. “Why are you sad?”

  “Because—”

  I could see she was really unsure of herself. Then she got it together.

  “Because Don—died.”

  Suddenly I felt sad, too. Terribly sad. Of course, for months I’d known Don was dead, but when she said that, in that room, where we’d talked just last week about how he must gather the apples, it was like he’d died again. I wondered if Maisie thought he’d only just died, or if she knew the whole truth—and which would be worse.

  “Who told you?” I said. Whoever it was, they shouldn’t have done. She’d been happy, believing in Don.

  “Oh, nobody told me,” she said. “It’s been coming upon me for a while.” I remembered how she had faltered at the thought of Don up the tree and falling and not being there anymore to eat her homemade apple pies. “Now I know for sure, like—you know—like night follows day and eggs are eggs. He died this summer. But”—she dropped her voice confidentially—“it’s a funny thing: Sometimes I think he’s still here.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Just shows the tricks a lonely old woman can play on herself.”

  I wondered if that meant I’d helped to trick her, by going along with the stuff about Don, by saying I’d take messages to him. When she told me to tell him to leave the tomatoes, should I have said, Maisie, there are no tomatoes? When she told me to tell him to take care on the ladder, should I have said, Look, don’t worry, he’s already dead?

  And then: If I’d tricked her over Don, would she think I’d made Icarus up as well? I was not to be trusted! Why should one be real, but not both? (And how strange that the one that was real—the flying boy—was so much less believable than the other—the old man picking tomatoes.)

  “Maisie,” I said cautiously, “do you remember that boy I told you about, who reckons he’s going to fly?”

  “Rubbish!” she said, and my heart sank. But then, “No boy is going to fly. I told you before.”

  “You do remember, though? About the feathers? The notes? The date?”

  “Of course I remember! What d’you take me for? I haven’t lost all my marbles, you know!”

  When she looked at me then, I saw with relief that her eyes were pretty much back to normal. The skin at the corners went into all its old creases when she added, “But I may have lost one or two: I can’t remember what date you said.”

  “November second. And guess what? I found out what’s important about it! I came to tell you. I know who Icarus is!”

  She listened while I said about the roll call and the list of birthdays. When I’d finished, her hand went up to her necklace. She held it for most of the rest of the conversation.

  “Well, well. Fancy it being your friend next door all along!”

  “He’s not my friend, I keep telling you,” I said.

  “Well, who is, then?”

  The question didn’t seem relevant. Must be those missing marbles, I thought, and I twisted it round in my head, to one I preferred.

  “He hasn’t got any friends,” I said.

  “Ah. A loner, is he? That fits. Loneliness can make crazies of us all.”

  Speak for yourself, I wanted to say, but it wouldn’t have been kind, so I didn’t. Nonetheless, suddenly feeling uncomfortable, I started to leave. She pushed me back into my chair so hard that my feet came right up off the floor, like in a cartoon.

  She was frowning with concentration. “Alex,” she said, and that was unusual; she rarely began a sentence with that. “Alex, I’m worried.”

  “So am I. I might miss lunch!”

  She ignored me. “If, as you say, it’s him, then you ought to tell someone.” She seemed to be squeezing her necklace now. Her knuckles were white.

  “I have. You!”

  “Someone else, I mean. Someone at school. A teacher. When people are having a laugh, that’s one thing, but when they’re not, that’s another. You have to consider their motivation.”

  This was getting silly.

  “He’s just putting on a show! You said so yourself! You wanted to go! It’ll be like a circus act or something … ”

  She shook her head. “This boy’s no clown.”

  He certainly wasn’t. Anyone less like a clown than Bogsy was hard to imagine. I smiled. But I couldn’t see what she was getting at and felt disappointed in her. Before, it had been as if she and I had been doing a jigsaw together. I’d brought her the pieces, one by one, and she’d fit them in and gotten excited. Now, for no good reason, she wanted to throw it all away. Perhaps there were more marbles missing than I’d thought.

  “I’m off now,” I said, and slipped out of my chair and past her, to the door. This time she didn’t try to stop me, but repeated her thing about how I must go to a teacher.

  “D’you want me to take any messages home, for Mum or Dad? Or anyone else?”

  I needed to distract her, and that line popped into my head. Leading her on like that was a trick, no question: I shouldn’t have done it. Especially as she’d just told me she’d finally realized the truth about Don. I half hoped she wasn’t going to fall for it—but she did. She let go of her necklace.

  “Yes! Tell Don, when he picks the apples, to line the shelves with paper. Tell him to make sure the apples don’t touch when he puts them out, because if they touch”—she stuffed her limp, wet hankie up her sleeve—“and one of them goes, they all will. Now.”

  I said okay, though I didn’t understand. It was only pretend, after all.

  “Better go out the same way you came in,” said Maisie, checking to see that the corridor was clear, “or we might be in trouble!”

  “Maisie’s not ill,” I told Mum and Dad. “They were lying, down at The Laurels.”

  “I’m sure they weren’t,” said Mum. “They’re responsible adults. She must have been ill and now she’s better. Well, I’m glad.”

  “No, she wasn’t ill in the first place. Just sad. About Don.” I lowered my voice. “She was crying.”

  “Oh dear,” said Mum. “Poor Maisie.”

  “But she’s fine again now. Now she’s gone back to thinking he’s still alive, and she’s okay.” I was telling myself that my trick had made her better, I know I was. Anyway, it was supposed to be the end of the conversation. I didn’t want to mention the marbles, how Maisie had inexplicably changed her mind. (They might have asked what she’d changed her mind about.) But Dad got there anyway, though he put it in different words. He was tapping his head.

  “No one’s really okay—up here—if they can believe something like that. That’s what they must have meant, at The Laurels: She isn’t well in her mind.”

  “You don’t understand. It’s not right,” I said, “to talk about well and ill: They don’t matter. Happy and sad are what matter, and if Maisie’s happy, she’s okay.”

  Mum looked at me then. “Yes,” she said, “perhaps. But whatever is going on in her head, it might be better if it weren’t. When someone’s got something physically wrong, then there’s more of a chance you can help.”

  In among all the things that had changed when I found out Icarus was Bogsy was this: the way I felt about what I heard through the wall, as I sat in Don’s shed. Before, the noises from Bogsy’s side had annoyed me. Now, when I heard them, I tried to imagine what he was doing. I began to be eaten up by the need to know.

  So, on Monday morning, I mis
sed the school bus. I ran up just as the door was closing behind Bogsy. I’d timed it well. I shouted and waved at the driver to stop, but he pretended not to see—as I’d known he would. He was mean, that driver, and hated us all. As the bus pulled away, several faces looked out through the windows—one was Alan Tydman’s—and laughed, but I couldn’t be bothered to put on my Stupid Me act. I’d get the B17 to school and it came in twenty minutes. I didn’t have long.

  I made myself wait at the stop till the school bus was finally out of sight, then I nipped back home. Dad’s car had gone—which was good—and a big banana-colored one was parked in its place. Good again. Mum’s a physiotherapist and sees patients at home, in her and Dad’s bedroom: She must have had an early appointment this morning, which meant she’d be occupied upstairs, at the front of the house. I could safely slip round the side and down the garden without being seen.

  The fence between our garden and Bogsy’s comes to an end before it gets to the sheds. Way back, it was put up by Don, and I think he must have run out of wood. When we lived in our old house and Don and Maisie were next door, we never minded the gap. If Don was digging in their garden and he saw me in ours, he’d sometimes come through—to give me a stripy snail shell or an interesting bit of old china.

  “Alex,” he’d say, “here’s a thing. You don’t see a thing like this every day.” Actually, thinking about it and knowing how much digging he did, he probably did—but I was always grateful to have whatever it was, for my collection.

  Nowadays, the gap in the fence is filled by our garbage cans, ours and the Marshes’. They’re all in a line, color coded green, blue, and black for the different types of trash, and there’s only a way through once a week, when some are taken out front for the garbage people to come and empty.

  I hadn’t planned it, but I was lucky: Today was garbage day. The black and the blue had gone, and the green ones stood alone and gappy, like witches’ teeth. I crept between them and poked my head out on Bogsy’s side. I didn’t know what his parents did in the morning; I’d have to be careful not to be seen. But there wasn’t anyone in the garden or at any of the windows of the house overlooking it. I ran out, trying to keep low to the ground, and let myself into their shed. I pulled the door shut behind me and took in the scene.

  And the scene was this: lit by the shed’s one window, set high up in the end wall opposite me—a huge, an astonishing, a magnificent mess. The floor was littered with chewing gum wrappers; the ceiling was stuck with drawing pins and nails, from which odd bits of string dangled down. Bogsy had brought in a table and chair and they—and every other raised surface (some shelves, a toolbox, the top of a big white chest freezer)—were covered with paint cans, balls of string, jam jars, paintbrushes, orange peels, apple cores, packets of gum. In among all the stuff on the table, I noticed last week’s math homework. He hadn’t handed it in, but he’d done it—all the way down to the bottom of the sheet. I’d gotten stuck (it was really hard) and handed mine in with the second half blank. I hadn’t known Bogsy was so good at math.

  There was junk everywhere and yet there was nothing, so far as I could see, to do with flying. Unless you counted a tattered old kite propped up against the wall behind Bogsy’s bike. That wall was remarkable for something else.

  That wall, despite the gloom of the shed, was a shimmering mass of suns!

  Bogsy had painted it all kinds of brilliant reds and yellows, in a pattern of circles. No, not circles: Each one was a spiral—and a spiral not painted, as you’d expect, from the center outward, but from the outside in. I could tell because the paint was always thickest round the edge. Bogsy must have loaded his brush, then gone round and round, getting smaller and smaller, tighter and tighter, paler and paler, till the paint ran out and the circle was too small to see. It was clever, that, the way he’d gotten the two things to happen simultaneously every time, no matter what size the spiral was—big or small—to begin with. At the center of each there was nothing. Pop! All gone! (As Mum used to say when Timmy was little and had finished his food.) Empty air—or you could think of it as the light at the end of a tunnel.

  One odd one out, though, I noticed. One of the spirals, bizarrely, had fixed at its center a cardboard tube—from a roll of aluminum foil or something. The tube stuck straight out from the wall and, perhaps because it was just at eye level, I stepped forward, parting a way through the litter with my toe, to look through.

  I’m not sure what I expected to see. If I’d been thinking straight: darkness, nothing, the blackness of inside the tube. But if I’d been thinking straight, I wouldn’t have put my eye to it at all. What I actually saw was: light! This was a cardboard tunnel with light at the end. A slot of light, like a miniature letter box. There must be a hole in the wall of the shed. I took my eye away briefly, to see. The wood of the wall had quite a few holes in it, knotholes—and, yes, here was one of them, slightly enlarged to fit the tube. It held the tube snugly. The tube, I now saw, poked right through.

  But if the tube and the hole were round (as they were), how could I have seen a rectangle of light? I looked again. There it was: horizontal, rather rough at the edges, but a definite slot. There must be two holes, one round, one straight-edged; the tube went through the first and butted up to the second. I already knew what the second hole went through, and why it was shaped like that. Bogsy’s shed stood back to back with—Don’s.

  The two stood so close that they touched. Bogsy’s shed was wood and had knot holes; Don’s shed was brick, getting old and crumbly, and had holes where chunks of mortar were missing. Whoever looked through this tube, looked through one of those holes. Right into Don’s shed. Which meant only one thing.

  Bogsy was a spy.

  Oh, and one other: He spied on me.

  I so nearly pulled out the tube! I managed to stop myself just in time. I remembered I mustn’t do anything that could let him know I’d been here.

  Bogsy was a spy. No wonder I’d always had that feeling. It wasn’t someone at the window, it wasn’t the spider, nor even the nibbler. All the time it was him.

  Bogsy was a spy, but that wasn’t all. There was something else. What? Why didn’t I despise him for doing what he’d done? He’d spotted that two holes—one through wood, one through bricks—were exactly aligned, and he’d set this up. I couldn’t despise him because it was brilliant! I looked through again.

  I wanted to see what Bogsy could see, beyond the end of the tube. I guessed I’d be able to look right across to the cobwebby window, which faced the back wall—maybe spy on the spider. But it turned out I couldn’t. There was something in the way.

  The thing in the way was the back of someone’s head.

  For a moment, in my confusion, I felt I was Bogsy—I’d wanted to see what he saw, after all—looking in on myself. But Alex Meadows didn’t have cropped gray hair and a freckly bald patch. Dad was balding a bit on top, but this wasn’t Dad. The head turned slightly, and I saw the shape of the nose (rather hooked) and cheekbones (pointy). I recognized those. But this didn’t make sense.

  It was Don.

  Don, who had died that summer, whose funeral I’d been to, was back in his shed. Dead people are beyond reach, gone forever, yet one had made it back and here he was, not much farther away from me than the length of an aluminum foil tube. He didn’t look dead, only still. Although I couldn’t see his eyes, I knew they’d be open and alive.

  And I wasn’t frightened, not one little bit. I’d never seen a ghost before, but obviously ghosts are supposed to be scary. Don in Don’s shed among all Don’s things just seemed comfortable and right. Seeing him there made me realize how much I’d missed him.

  And then he yawned and rubbed his forehead. The sound and the gesture were both so real, so unghostly, they gave me another idea. What if he wasn’t a visiting ghost? What if I was? What if Bogsy’s tube was a wormhole going through to a parallel world? Alice fell down a rabbit hole into Wonderland, after all. What if Maisie lived here, in this Wonderland world, wi
thout anyone knowing? That would explain a lot. She was right to believe Don was still alive because, here, he was! Believing in ghosts was more Timmy’s style, but Don in a parallel universe was cool.

  Did that mean I’d lost my marbles? Dad would say so. He’d say anyone who could believe such stuff wasn’t right in the head. But you have to believe your own eyes—and here was Don, in front of mine.

  I suddenly feared I’d spent much more time in Bogsy’s shed than I’d meant to. So, carefully rearranging the chewing gum wrappers as I went, I backed to the door. I let myself out and slipped back between the trash cans.

  No time to go and peep in at the door of Don’s shed, even if I had wanted to. Which I didn’t. Without looking over my shoulder, I ran up our garden and round the side of the house. All was well: The big yellow car was still there.

  I caught the B17 to school by the skin of my teeth.

  “Wakey wakey!” sneered Alan Tydman when I opened the classroom door. Miss McGowan shushed him.

  Everyone was in their place. Everyone was looking at me.

  “You’re late, Alex Meadows,” said Miss McGowan.

  “Alex Stay-in-Bed-ows,” called Jack Tweedy, and everyone laughed.

  “Be quiet!” Miss McGowan snapped. “Alex, you’re late, but you’re lucky. I haven’t yet got to your name in the roll call, so you won’t be marked absent. I gather you missed the bus: Don’t do it again. Right. Quickly. Sit down.”

  I wondered who had told her. I glanced at Bogsy, but it wasn’t his style. As I passed Alan Tydman, he whispered, “Alex Bed-ows!” and I knew.

  But I didn’t care. I’d discovered a parallel universe in a little old garden shed! Who could care about Alan Tydman—or Jack Tweedy and his stupid names—after that? Even Icarus could wait. (Maybe Icarus came from the parallel universe! Bogsy’s tube was the link, after all. Maybe Bogsy knew all about it and that’s how he dared to behave as he did!)

  Miss McGowan could get cross and tell me Don’t miss the bus again or else—but it made no difference. Nothing and no one was going to stop me missing it tomorrow. I couldn’t wait to see Maisie’s face when I told her I’d seen Wonderland!